Gathie Falk

“The veneration of the ordinary”—that is the phrase most often used to describe what Gathie Falk realizes through her art. And “beloved”—that is the word most frequently employed regarding Falk herself, as in “beloved senior Canadian artist,” now 94 years of age. But, of course, she and her oeuvre are so complex and multifaceted that it takes whole books and substantial exhibitions to fully illuminate the transformative interdisciplinary artworks she has created out of everyday images, objects and activities over some 50 years. The exhibition “Gathie Falk: Revelations” attempts to spread some light—and explicate some shadow.

Organized and circulated by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, and on view recently at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, British Columbia, the show is absent too many important works across Falk’s career to stand as a comprehensive retrospective. Rather, it is a kind of sampler, a themed selection of (mostly) paintings and sculptures to reveal, as the McMichael’s Sarah Milroy writes in the show’s accompanying publication, “the arc of life … time’s passage and the journey from ripeness to rot.” Sadly, Falk’s many surreal and inventive installations are represented here by one rather diminished version of her Hanging Cabbages from the late 1970s. And her important role as a pioneer of performance art in Canada is telegraphed by still photos from the series of urban picnics staged by Falk and Tom Graff in 1969–70 and by a fuzzy projection of a 1977 videotape of Red Angel, with accompanying props and costumes. Not that the latter wasn’t a groundbreaking work when it was first presented in 1972—it was and is, as observed by Hank Bull in the companion book. (Other contributors to the book include Daina Augaitis, Nancy Tousley, Jocelyn Anderson, Landon Mackenzie, Liz Magor and John Geoghegan.)

The show’s introductory text panel identifies a few of Falk’s recurring themes: “order and disorder, the sacramental quality of daily life, the exaltation of the ordinary, and time’s swift and relentless passage.” Brief—very brief—mention is made of the artist’s Mennonite faith, her immigrant family’s flight to Canada from persecution in Russia, and the long, hard road Falk travelled before becoming a visual artist. Not mentioned here is the premature death of her father when she was a baby, and the conditions of poverty and need that tragedy cast across her childhood and youth.

Throughout the exhibition, Falk’s two- and three-dimensional works are installed in ways that oddly complement or inflect each other. In the first gallery, seven expressionistic paintings from the early 1960s are exhibited together with eight of the much better-known ceramic sculptures—the luscious and glossy “fruit piles” from 1969–1971, their pyramidal structures inspired by a display of apples at a local grocery store. Apart from her intentionally childlike still lifes, a number of Falk’s early oil-on-Masonite paintings are scary and grotesque, filled with foreboding, revealing both the stylistic influence of German expressionism and the emotional impact on Falk of her mother’s descent into paranoid dementia. They include The Staircase, an oppressive interior with heaving walls, looming shadows and, yes, a dark, descending staircase on which two scarcely articulated figures appear trapped. They also include The Waitress, a restaurant scene in which an immense server, grinning maniacally, encircles her small, fearful customers with her long arms and hunched shoulders. Bearing a coffee pot and creamer, she takes on the aspect of a vampire—or a dark, satanic angel.

The journey from ripeness to rot was evident in Falk’s art from the very beginning, it seems. Even the fruit piles, with their brilliant colours and beauteous abundance, include depictions of rotting fruit and speak of death and decay in the midst of life. They might also suggest sacrifice: installed in front of Falk’s painting of an upside-down crucifixion rendered in heavily impasted oil, the fruit could be offerings awaiting placement on an altar.

Falk’s celebrated “Bootcases” from 1973—ceramic sculptures of men’s shoes and boots mounted within glass-fronted wooden cabinets and, as with the fruit piles, inspired by a form of retail display—can also be given a death-in-life interpretation, although one that is nestled within the context of pop art and funk ceramics. The well-worn footwear, so humbly eloquent of quotidian to-ing and fro-ing, might be entombed in those cabinets. (Tousley suggests an analogy to saintly relics and reliquaries.) Evident here and elsewhere—and a key to Falk’s creative practice, as identified by Augaitis—are surrealism and seriality. Falk has long been a believer in the power of repetition.

Those qualities are also manifest in Falk’s 1976–77 “Picnics,” a series of ceramic sculptures with burial plot-like forms and memento mori symbols such as mantel clocks, one of which bears the offering of a small dead bird. But there are scenes of everyday beauty and abundance in Falk’s return to painting in the early 1980s, especially in her colourful depictions of the flower gardens that bordered her lawn and sidewalk—not that we are allowed to encounter these works with uninflected joy. In the gallery where they are hung, Falk’s ambiguously menacing papier mâché sculpture, The Problem with Wedding Veils, from 2010–11 also stands. No mention is made here of the artist’s disastrous and short-lived marriage; instead, we must read this work, with its jagged-toothed crown and heavy burden of river rocks, as a negative review of a generic and perhaps inevitable aspect of life’s span.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Falk emerged as a rhapsodic colour field painter with two series of large-scale oil-on-canvas works, “Night Skies” and “Pieces of Water.” Then she seemed to return to the deathly—or at least, the shadowy and the ghostly—in her “Theatre in B/W and Colour.” These paintings, mostly produced in the early to mid-1980s, are characterized by repetitive arrangements of ordinary objects: rows and rows of dangling light bulbs or kitchen chairs or garden stakes. These may be juxtaposed with loveliness, such as floral bouquets, or with the unexpected and surreal, say, dead fish. All the depicted objects cast long and intricate shadows; as well, the cheerful-hued paintings are often twinned with ghostly versions of themselves—that is, with paintings bearing the same compositions but drained of colour. Overly crowded with visual incident and complicated networks of lines and shapes, these paintings are not Falk’s best. More satisfying is her subsequent series of single kitchen chairs, one bearing a heap of camellias, and another, a bundle of dead fish wrapped in a pink ribbon. The surrealism here is not incidental: the chairs serve as altars and the fish and flowers as offerings.

The show concludes with Falk’s curious painting series “Heavenly Bodies,” along with her late-life revisiting of “Night Skies” and two of her sculptures of reclining figures. Five-pointed stars and haloed moons look down upon Stella, in white papier mâché, her pleated skirt as extravagantly flared as a giant nasturtium, and Lizzie, in bronze with a sombre black patina and one skinny knee raised beneath a modest skirt. As with Falk’s earlier paintings and sculptures based on clothing, these works ably symbolize the human body and, as many have observed, evoke presence through absence.

Falk has spoken to me about the ways in which growing up without a father shaped her early life and later artmaking. The experience was not one of loss, she said, because she never consciously knew her father; rather, it was one of a profound sense of absence, of lack and want. If, as indicated here, Stella and Lizzie, wrapped as they are around empty space, mark for Falk the passing of loved ones, then perhaps the true arc of her life is not from ripeness to rot but from absence to eloquent absence. ❚

“Gathie Falk: Revelations” was organized by McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, and was on exhibition from June 18, 2022, to January 8, 2023. It then toured to Audain Art Museum, Whistler, British Columbia, from November 25, 2023, to May 6, 2024.

Robin Laurence is an independent writer, critic and curator based in Vancouver. She has written extensively about Gathie Falk in books, catalogues and magazines and is the co-author of Falk’s memoir, Apples, etc.